»Dédiée à tous les grandes violonistes que j’admire«

For violin and piano
Premiere: February 1981, in the Vienna Konzerthaus (Mozartsaal), played by the composer
Duration: ca. 6 minutes
Polish Premiere: Warsaw, June 1981

Published by Edition Contemp Art (Verlagsgruppe Hermann),
Obtainable via www.schott-music.com
Product number: VGH 2257-70 (Score and parts)

Audio sample:

René Staar, violin
Harald Ossberger, piano
(recorded January 12th 1985, ORF-Funkhaus, Vienna) 

Parodies often play a liberating role in Staar’s oeuvre, as loosening-up exercises between earnest efforts to find new ideas and noble metals deep in the »mines of ideas«, which require a long time for their processing and evolution. The estrangement from and parodistic doodling on well-known melodies, genres, or styles is in his Hommage à un temps perdu op. 6 rather subtly applied. The three parts (Air, Perpetuum mobile, and Rezitativo) of this homage to the great violin tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries are on the one had unchanged respective to the original characters. But their grotesque diminution and the rather artificial manner of articulation and phrasing make this potpourri appear parodistic. Staar says: »today, in 2014, this piece is like a distant memory of ideals dreamt of in the naiveté of youth, appearing through the filter of a very light irony«.

New harmonic connections evolve out of three different intervals first presented in the »Cadence«. These are combined with the assistance of the piano and then helped out with older song and dance forms such as Air, Habanera, Valse, and Zapateado. The »Petit Perpetuum mobile« provides a virtuosic conclusion to the work, which in its entirety intends to recall the great violin virtuoso tradition which, after two world wars, seems in Europe only a romantic memory. Is it then just a »lost epoch«, a time to which we no longer have any connection?